You don't really see it in your 20s, you really haven't experienced enough to see that you make choices in your life, and one choice leads to another… -Bret Easton Ellis I've gotten older, and as I've gotten older, I've realized in a lot of ways that lives have narratives. And what you really had to do was be very true to a narrator's voice, be very true to the milieu you are dissecting, and don't add a plot in because it… seems bookish. My aesthetic when I was a young writer, when I was in my 20s, was that narrative was phoney it was artificial story was artificial plot was artificial it was all fake. Often, it is almost a distraction from the aspects of the story I really enjoy. To me, if a story sticks with me, it’s because of the characters, setting, theme, ideas, style-the plot is usually not the thing that makes something live in my head for years at a time. After this analysis, I feel a little less guilty. After puzzling over this, I tracked down various interviews with Bret Easton Ellis where he said that three or four of his most famous novels deliberately have no narrative at all because he considered narartive to be artificial at the time when he wrote those stories (an attitude he’s changed his mind about-see the quote below).įor years, I have had a lack of interest in plot and felt guilty about this.
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